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Bill Gates, Windows 98, Blue Screen of Death

failednation
Other
YouTube
Cited on HN 4 times, 2019–2026, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN cites it as the classic demo failure, in threads about USB, plug and play, and Microsoft's shipping quality.

A very short clip of Bill Gates hitting a Blue Screen of Death while demonstrating plug and play on Windows 98 on stage.

“the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98” (HN, 2026)

2 citations · 1 critical · 1 jokes · Other

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@rasz Jan 2021 Cites it
on HN thread The Confusing World of USB
Read more
Love Fabien write-ups! > badly fragmented connector world made of Dont forget SCSI. USB killed external SCSI. >Up to that point in time, it was a good tech stack. USB 0.9 was 1995, USB 1.0 1996. Two years later we had Bill Gates getting embarrassed by Windows 98 BSOD on stage [this video] . By ~2002 we ended up with 6 separate incompatible proprietary variations on micro USB. Pretty much every second Camera vendor had its won "standard". >USB-3.X cables features 8 wires .... and the other six carry data Sadly just adding even more confusion to the mix. 24 pins, up to 13 signals, 4 pairs (8 wires) dedicated to USB 3.2 alone. >Thanks to DP 1.4, the bandwidth requirement can be lowered via DSP lossless compression oh its very much lossy, Display Stream Compression (DSC) is "visually lossless" :--------) it works similar to Texture Compression, but works on blocks of lines instead of rectangles, still it does destroy information by cutting off color accuracy. At the end of the day USB is still trivial compared to Bluetooh.
@ulfw Oct 2019 Makes a joke
on HN thread A German word for:“It only works when I try to show you how it does not work”?
That translation is wrong. It’s almost the opposite. Vorführeffekt is when you are trying to show something works (for example to an audience/in a presentation) and it does NOT work in said presentation. Remember this oldie but goldie for USB Plug and Play on Windows? [this video] PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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